Lebanese President Joseph Aoun gave a remarkable interview to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on June 5th. He accused Iran of using Lebanon as a bargaining chip. He said the Lebanese people are fed up with Hezbollah. He extended his hand for direct peace talks with Israel. For a Lebanese president, that is not nothing. It is, in fact, historically significant.

But significance is not absolution. And honesty, selectively applied, is not honesty at all. Aoun’s sharp words about Iran and Hezbollah did not emerge from a vacuum of courage. They emerged from the wreckage of a country bled dry — by an eroding economy that has destroyed the living standards of ordinary Lebanese, by an Israeli military campaign that has killed thousands and displaced far more, and by relentless American pressure on a president who owes his election in January 2025 largely to Washington’s backing. His criticism is real. It is also, in no small part, the product of circumstance. Acknowledging that is not unfair to Aoun. It is necessary context for understanding what his words are actually worth.

Because in the same interview, Aoun held up a photograph of a 3-month-old baby killed in the war and asked: “Was this child an imminent threat?” It is a legitimate and painful question. But the framing was not neutral. It was a blood libel in everything but name — the ancient, lethal insinuation that Jews murder children deliberately, that their violence is not war but ritual. Amanpour, predictably, amplified it: “We see these kinds of pictures coming out of Gaza, coming out of the occupied West Bank.” And there it was— the radical left’s central narrative, the axis of resistance’s most effective Western export, delivered in a CNN studio with the Lebanese president’s implicit endorsement.

A man who genuinely extends his........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)